Tsui Kwo Yin – What a wedding gift! – a cloak of Tibetan goat

The late Qing Dynasty Chinese diplomat Tsui Kwo Yin (Cui Guoyin) is not well remembered by China. He is seen as ineffectual at best and actually harmful to the cause of China at worst. Tsui was a senior diplomat though, representing China in major countries such as America, Japan and Peru. However, his English language skills were not deemed sufficient to really get his points across to the American media at a time when China sought to both protect its countrymen against discrimination and voice its disapproval of the Chinese Exclusion Act.  He is also criticised for being bad at small talk (silly, but probably quite a useful skill for a diplomat) and a bit of an introvert. But this is a slightly different and more positive anecdote…from Juliet Nicolson’s A House Full of Daughters about her mother, grandmother (Vita Sackville West), great grandmother (the Victoria noted below) and great-great grandmother, the Spanish dancer and beauty Pepita.

In 1892 Victoria West (below) was married to Lionel Sackville-West. Victoria’s parentage is a tricky business (to complicated to go into fully here – I’d suggest reading A House Full of Daughters) but she had spent time in Washington DC in the 1880s when her father (also called Lionel Sackville-West – the uncle of the Lionel above and so they were first cousins, which was generally acceptable then) was British Ambassador to the USA. She was very popular, her looks and character much admired (she was reputedly proposed to at least 25 times by many famous men) and obviously also, along with her father, well-remembered.

So well-remembered that Tsui Kwo Yin sent her a wedding present from Washington to the Sackville-West family estate of Knole (in Sevenoaks, Kent). What he actually sent was a cloak of Tibetan goat. I don’t know whatever happened to that cloak (perhaps Juliet Nicolson knows?) but what a grand gift!! A nice gesture from someone rather written out of Qing-era diplomatic history now…

Here we have Minister Tsui himself, illustrated shortly after his Ambassadorship in Washington finished (1893) and himself and his retinue departing America for China….